James Avery

When Claude Opus 4.5 generates an Artifact, it doesn't just render a React app. It incorporates the business, files the LLC paperwork in Delaware, and closes a Series A funding round before the UI finishes rendering.

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An update on behalf of the .NET Foundation Project Committee... The most active Community projects for January 2026 were: Pull Requests: Bootstrap Blazor (69), Orchard Core (65) Commits: .NEXT (1349), Stride (217) New Contributors: .NEXT (7) Downloads: Polly (45.9M), Fluent Validation (22.3M) Full list: https://lnkd.in/ea2UB3st The most active Microsoft projects for January 2026 were: Pull Requests: .NET Runtime (622), Azure SDK for .NET (474), .NET Aspire (329) Commits: Roslyn (698), .NET Runtime (413)  New Contributors: .NET Runtime (16), .NET Aspire (15) Full list: https://lnkd.in/eCXKbiTx #opensource #dotnet .NET Foundation

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Don't believe the BS that you can use Claude Code for free. Ollama recently made their API compatible with Claude Code. Many creators quickly jumped on the opportunity to farm engagement with the hook: "You can now use Claude Code for free!" My thought? Claude Code without Opus 4.5 is not Claude Code. Period. But this is exciting news. Not because I can use Claude Code for free, but because I see an opportunity to optimize costs by delegating easier tasks to local LLMs. The key question is: what tasks can local LLMs handle? I tested out 7 local LLMs. In this post, I will explain the BS and share my 1st experiment. -- Why the BS? Claude Code has been praised as one of the best AI tools by its users, not only for coding but for many other tasks. But the price feels steep to many. The $20/month plan is not enough for any serious work. You need to at least subscribe to Max 5x ($100/month). Many heavy users, including me, subscribe to Max 20x ($200/month). It’s a steal. But still, many were eager to try it but aren't ready to pay. Ollama's recent announcement means you can buy a Mac, a Strix Halo, or a GPU and use Claude Code for "free" with local LLMs. It’s appealing, as it is a one-time investment, and you can use the machine for other purposes. Creators are leveraging this opportunity to farm engagement. But the reality? Claude Code without Opus 4.5 is not the same Claude Code we praised. Local LLMs are far less intelligent. -- But for those who understand the difference, we see an opportunity to optimize costs by delegating some easier tasks to local LLMs. I'm interested in finding out what tasks local LLMs can handle. This is my typical flow when using Claude Code. This is for coding, but I have similar flows for marketing and content creation. 1. Research and planning 2. Create PRD and implementation plan 3. Break plan into bite-sized tasks 4. Implement + review with reflection pattern 5. Final review with agents 6. Final review and QA by me Based on my quick tests, we can forget about asking local LLMs to do research and planning. All of them failed at a simple instruction: "Visit https://learnparrot.ai/ and tell me about the website." So, I think the most viable use cases would only be (4) — implementation + review loops. While it looks like a very narrow use case, it is where we burn a lot of tokens. So I think it is worth a try. The main selection criteria for this will be instruction-following capability. One very common task is to refer to code samples or templates to code a new feature or page. This is a good test of instruction-following. So, I crafted my first test: - Used Opus to create HTML that I can screenshot as a LinkedIn carousel to display info for each model. - Turned one of the pages into a template and deleted the rest. - Asked each LLM to refer to the template to code its own page, given its specs. Swipe the carousel to see the results. Who would you hire? #LocalLLM #ClaudeCode #VibeCoding

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Vibe Coding is picking up steam. What does this mean for development costs? I'm curious about the real-world implications. For entrepreneurs and small businesses, website development has always been a significant investment. Even basic implementations require serious budget consideration. Vibe Coding promises faster development cycles and reduced complexity. That sounds compelling. But I want to understand the practical impact. Questions: • Will this democratize web development for smaller budgets? • How does code quality compare to traditional development? • What happens to the development timeline - weeks instead of months? • Does this shift the cost structure from build to maintenance? The marathon runner in me knows that shortcuts in training usually show up on race day. But genuine efficiency improvements? Those can be transformational. For the developers and agency owners, what are you seeing? Have you experimented with Vibe Coding approaches? What's the real performance versus the promise?

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Not every product failure is a tech problem. Some are taste problems. Quinn Favret and Hassaan Raza make a powerful case in this episode. Fast shipping is great. But if you don’t love what you’re building or who you’re building it for, it shows. This conversation is a reminder to create with conviction, not just code. Want more insights like this? Subscribe to The AI Report here: https://lnkd.in/gGi2d5fK

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This is a really interesting article about writing agents with the Claude Agent SDK. It gets into design advice that you should consider when writing an agent with Claude. It chimes with what I’ve read about the development of Claude Code (write as little business logic as possible and concentrate on getting out of the way of the model). The general takeaway for me is from the three-block flow chart in the middle: Give the agent good tools/affordances in three categories: Gather Context, Take Action, Verify work. Do that at the right granularity, with good feedback, and then let the model do the driving. It’s deceptively simple, but it has a goldilocks quality to it. Trying to make a more complex flow chart with many more boxes and lines constrains the AI to just the things you could think of in advance and makes it overfit to what you know today. Trying to make it simpler by, for example, giving the agent a whole existing API as a single tool can overwhelm it with too much choice and then too much context in the responses. It’s definitely worth reading if you're interested in building or using agents, irrespective of AI vendor. https://lnkd.in/eKF2rXWb

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What should Non-Technical Founders know about building Custom Software? We walk clients through this process regularly and put together some tips that could be helpful even before you START talking to Development Partners. https://lnkd.in/eRGsgwq3

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Roo Code lets you mold your #AI coding agent into what you actually need. Brandon Mathis from This Dot Labs built custom modes for documentation, pair programming, writing specs, and improving his prompts. If you're serious about agent workflows (which you have to be), this is worth a read.

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So which models produce HTML that has the least accessibility errors, and at what cost? Mapped it out here (bottom left is the best). This is helpful for understanding which models are most compliant for those with disabilities and do it efficiently. Qwen and Gemini 2.5 Flash lead the pack. Hat tip to Ben Ogilvie for pointing me to this: aimac.ai

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If you're looking for a new docs framework for your dev tool, I can't recommend Docusaurus enough. 1. You can change the appearance of any component—no matter how big or small—by ejecting its raw React code into your source tree. I've ejected almost all of its major components and restyled them with Tailwind. 2. It supports content written with MDX, which is like Markdown but better. MDX lets you write JSX tags so you can render React components (like badges and banners) directly inline your content. No more messy templating. 3. It bundles Prism for code snippet highlighting. So you if you want to change how each and every token of your language gets styled—which I do—you can override it with a simple centralized map—which I have. 4. You can swap out its on-site search engine with Algolia, now widely considered the best option for developer sites. It is, in other words, the perfect tool for people like me who are obsessed with every pixel.

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Agents are the new apps. And they just went multiplayer. The software engineering landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. Google just dropped Firebase Studio. And it might just replace half the AI builder startups out there. You’ve probably seen tools like Lovable, bolt.new, Vercel's v0, or Cursor. They let you build AI-powered apps without writing much code. Describe what you want — boom — they create UIs, workflows, and automation for you. It’s fast. It’s smart. It’s changing how software is built. Now imagine that… backed by Google. What is Firebase Studio? Firebase Studio is Google’s new end-to-end app builder for AI-first products. It combines: ✅ UI generation ✅ Agent workflows (like AgentSpace) ✅ Firebase backend (auth, storage, hosting, etc.) ✅ Google’s best Gemini models AgentSpace is like a command center for AI agents. It lets you create multistep workflows, connect APIs, and manage how agents behave. Great for product teams prototyping internal tools, automations, or AI assistants. But it’s still pretty early-stage. Right now, Firebase Studio and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) are two separate moves from Google — but they are strategically aligned, and integration is very likely coming. You need to manage agents, instructions, tools, and sometimes code. Why this matters for product managers? → The barrier to building software is decreasing. → With Firebase Studio, a product manager can do what used to take a team. The AI agent is becoming the new app. Not just chat. Agents that do stuff: send emails, fetch data, run logic. Google wants to standardise agents across platforms. Their new Agent-to-Agent protocol (A2A) means your agents could soon talk to each other — across apps, tools, maybe even companies. Enter MCP: The USB-C for AI Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools. MCP is a standardised protocol designed to streamline the way AI models communicate with external systems, eliminating the need for custom integrations. With so many advancements happening rapidly, it’s challenging to keep up and navigate them within the realities of development. Yet, it has never been more exciting to be in the software engineering space. #AI #FirebaseStudio #ProductManagement #Innovation #TechTrends #MCP #A2A

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